Predicting Federer-Tursunov and other Friday French Open Matches Using Markov Chain
Today I was enamored with the FiveThirtyEight.com article, Inside the Shadowy World of High-Speed Tennis Betting. The article mentions the courtsiders who would sit court side at a tennis match and try to relay information quicker than the tournament computers to betting partners. Great read. Not sure these courtsiders were really doing anything illegal. Buried deep in the article was a mention of the system this one organization created to predict the outcome of tennis matches for betting purposes. It links to a website, Summer of Jeff, and a post, Python Code for Tennis Markov. If you follow the links to the gitHub site, there is some pretty elaborate Python code for generating probabilities based on Markov Chain theory. The code is pretty easy to use, if you understand Python and statistics, although it needs some cleaning up if you plan on using it for entire match prediction (hint: the matchProbs function needs some fixes to run). ...